Tintoretto was an Italian painter of the Mannerist style known for his use of deep perspective in dramatic scenes. Works such as The Last Supper (1594), conveyed his otherworldly vision of events, through contrast and plunging pictorial space. “Indeed, he has surpassed even the limits of extravagance with the new and fanciful inventions and the strange vagaries of his intellect, working at haphazard and without design, as if to prove that art is but a jest,” Giorgio Vasari once wrote of him. “This master at times has left as finished works sketches still so rough that the brushstrokes may be seen, done more by chance and vehemence than with judgment and design.” Born Jacopo Robusti c. 1518 in Venice, Italy, he took the last name of tintoretto (little dyer) after his father’s profession as a silk dyer. Little is known of his training, but it is likely he studied the works of both Michelangelo and Titian as a youth. Reacting against the harmonized, pastoral scenes popularized by Giorgione in the 1540s, he produced turbulent paintings based on drawings of staged wax figurines arranged in stark lighting. Tintoretto was highly sought after during his life, and with the death of Titian, he and Paolo Veronese were the giants of Venetian painting. The artist died on May 31, 1594 in Venice, Italy. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Louvre Museum in Paris, the National Gallery in London, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and the Palazzo Ducale in Venice, among others.